Your daily dose of DotNET From India

4 posts categorized "Windows 8"

January 27, 2014

This is part IV and final part of the series. Part I, II & III can be found here, here and here.

Ok, so what if you are a desktop .NET developer (XAML, C# or VB etc.) and web development is something you don’t want to do. Well Windows 8 modern/store apps still use XAML, something that WPF developers will be comfortable with. But as mentioned before, if you want to take your skills to other platforms, you need third party support.

Xamarin is a platform that allows you to write .NET code that will run on iOS and Android. They use the mono framework (a port of .NET to Linux) to enable this magic the happen.

Xamarin also takes an unique approach to cross platform development. It uses a platform specific view layer and the View Model, Model and lower layers (in a MVVM architecture) are reused. So if you need to use Xamarin, you do need knowledge of creating views using XCode (for iOS) or Ecllipse (for Android) using the native code. The VM obviously is impacted by the View itself, but the model and below is all .NET code.

So if you are a .NET desktop developer using WPF/SL or similar you are quite comfortable with MVVM and a lot of your skills will directly transfer to the mobile platforms using Xamarin.

January 03, 2014

This is a series of blog post I wanted to write aimed at .Net developers and how mobility has an impact on the skills you have. I am not sure how many posts I will write in this series, but initially I think there will be at least 2-3. So here goes…

Say you are a .NET developer and have built skills over the past couple of years around either the web or the desktop development platforms. So you have spent time to build skills around C#/VB, .NET framework, SQL Server and maybe even WCF which are common across different development platforms that make up the Microsoft stack.

Now you have been hit by the mobility wave and you are at a cross road. What can you do? Do you take the easiest option and upgrade your skills to WindowsRT (the new .NET framework derivative that is part of Windows 8 Metro Modern Apps) or abandon ship and move to the other more successful mobile platforms like iOS/Android etc. Obviously if you had been a Java developer the path to Android is quite easy, but do you want to abandon the years you spent building your .NET skills and jump ship?

Well this post start off with the easiest option. Moving your skills to WindowsRT. This is an absolute child’s play for people who have been working WPF/Silverlight platforms because your XAML skills come into play directly. You will still have to learn the new UX design language and the constraints that WinRT puts, but it is a simple path to take. The biggest challenge I see people facing is not usually from the UX design, but rather understanding the things they cannot do. E.g. if you are trying to do complex stuff around encryption, then the WinRT limited support for the cryptography namespace can literally may you tear you hairs out..:)

If you are on the web side of development, then WinRT still is an option, as you can move your HTML/JS skills over using the HTML5/JS approach to build Modern apps. Again there is some skill building needed, but still I think it is quite an easy upgrade curve for your skills.

The other gotcho here is that Windows8 and Windows Phone8 are still not on the same development platform. So you will have to build extra skills (it is not only the UI/form factor changing like in iOS/Android, but the APIs/platform themselves changing) if you need to target both tablets and phones on the windows platform. Again something that may get solved as the two platforms integrate and unify sometime in the future (nobody knows for sure when though).

The only problem with the easy approach, is that it is dependent on Windows 8 (your apps are not going to run on Win7 machines, nor or on other mobile platforms). So this is dependent on Windows8 being successful in the mobile space and that is a tough call as of now. Even though the number of Win8 licenses being sold maybe increasing and you are seeing new tablet devices out there, these are nowhere near getting a big enough market share in the near future to dethrone any of the existing leaders.

If the enterprise you are with is going to adopt Window8 or WP8, then this is the easiest skill upgrade path for you to get into the mobile world.

September 19, 2012

Came across this app when browsing the App Store today. This is an app that allows you to visualize your disk drive/directory and see how space is being used. This app has some interesting visualizations built into it and is built like a game UI. It does not follow any of the Metro UI guidelines, but still looks quite cool.

It has a kind of gamey look and feel and also the app store listing says it is built by a games designer using tools used for building games.

Is it useful for your day to day tasks?

Well not really. It looks cool, but just allows you to view how your disk is bieng used in a more visual manner. It support a couple of diffferent graph types like pies and bars. It allows you to drill down into directories and see the usage by directory and by file types. But you do this kind of work rarely and there are better tools that allow you to find those large space grabbing files that you want to delete. Though this app too allows you to look at files based on a usage timeline, it does not allow you to actully get to the file level and that basically negates its usage to find large files when you want to free up some disk space.

March 27, 2012

For all of those power users keyboard shortcuts are part of life. So this document that lists all major keyboard shortcuts in Windows 8 should be of great help to get used to the new UI and the related set of extended keyboard shortcuts.